Facebook Ads // Boosting Posts 101

Facebook boosted posts: a quick guide to the blue button

Facebook offers business pages a few different ways to advertise, the most simple way is to boost one of your posts.

What are boosted posts?

They look like any other post, you’ve probably seen many of them in your newsfeed before. Maybe you’ve noticed the Sponsored label underneath the company name next to their avatar. These are Boosted Posts.

Typically brands will boost a post so that it has a better chance of being seen on their fans newsfeed.

When to use boosted posts

Before boosting your posts, it is important to determine what the aim or reason for advertising on Facebook is so that you choose the type of ad that is best suited to your goals.

More often than not, the goal of a boosted post is to increase engagement – likes, clicks, comments, shares – so they are often used to promote new content. Sometimes, but to a lesser extent, boosted posts are used to create greater brand awareness.

How to boost a post

1. Choose the post

Find a post on your page that you’d like to use. Posts that can be boosted include status updates, photos and videos and offers. The post must be on a Facebook business page, not a personal profile.

On the post click the ‘boost post’ button in the bottom right-hand corner. A window will appear allowing you to preview the ad and set the budget and audience parameters.

2. Select your audience

When you boost a post you can select who the ads are targeted to:

people who like your page

people who like your page and their friends

people who’ve interacted with your page

people you choose to target based on interests, location, age and gender

3. Set your budget

Before your ads start running you will need to allocate a budget to them. Your budget is determined by the size of the audience you want to reach, the greater the number the higher the spend will be.

The selected audience combined with your budget will give you an Estimated Reach for your ads. Therefore, if you want to broaden your reach you can increase the budget, likewise, if you are wanting to spend less you can decrease the reach by narrowing the audience.

Look at the insights

Once your ads are up and running don’t forget to check on their performance. You can find out your audience demographics, interests and other valuable information that can inform future advertising campaigns and content you post.

To see how an ad is performing simply click on the ‘See results’ button on the post that you’ve boosted. You can see how many people the ad reached and the actions they took.

For more detailed insights once the ad has finished running go to the Promotions tab in your Page Insights.